Advancing digitalization and transformation: A network analysis with future research directions

The rapid proliferation of digitalization technologies has spurred transformative changes across global business landscapes, prompting scholarly exploration of its multifaceted implications. This study systematically reviews 6294 core documents from leading journals in Business, Economics, and Management to trace the evolutionary trajectory of digitalization research in the 21st century. Employing network analysis methods, we identify the distribution of digital research fields, influential journals and institutions, milestone documents, and the evolution of research themes. The results indicate that recent research on the development of digitization technologies has shifted focus from Big Data Analysis, Cloud Computing, and Blockchain to Artificial Intelligence. Digital research in business has shifted focus from applying digitization technologies in corporations to transforming these corporations digitally, and eventually to digitalization entire industries. Building on these insights, we propose a future research agenda centered on three emerging frontiers: Direct Marketing, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation, supplementing the existing theoretical framework of research and contributing to future research directions.